Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (84 page)

Polanski’s attorney, working in conjunction with LAPD, divided the $25,000 reward as follows: Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham each received $12,000, while Steven Weiss, the young boy who found the .22 caliber murder weapon, received $1,000.

Neither Danny DeCarlo nor Alan Springer was around to share in the reward. Shortly before the Watson trial, Danny skipped bail on the federal gun charge and fled to Canada; his exact whereabouts are unknown. According to LAPD, biker Al Springer simply “vanished.” It is not known whether he is alive or dead.

Ronnie Howard tried working as a cocktail waitress but found it difficult to hold a job. Everywhere she went, she said, she was identified as the “Manson case snitch.” Several times she was beaten up on her way home from work, and one night someone fired a bullet through the living-room window of her apartment, missing her head by inches. The would-be assailant was never identified. The next day she told reporters: “I should have kept my mouth shut in the first place.”

Virginia Graham had a job as a receptionist in a legal office and seemed well on the way to rehabilitation, when she jumped parole. As this is written, she is still a fugitive.

Seven months after reporter Bill Farr declined to tell Judge Older who gave him the Virginia Graham statement regarding the “celebrity murders” the Manson Family had planned, Judge Older called Farr back into court and ordered him to either do so or be found in contempt.

Under California law the confidentiality of a reporter’s news sources is protected. However, since the Tate-LaBianca trial, Farr had left the Los Angeles
Herald Examiner
and was now working in a press secretary job. Older said that since he was no longer a reporter he was no longer protected by the law. Farr argued that if Older’s order was permitted to stand, both the news media and the public would suffer, since, if not guaranteed anonymity, many persons would decide not to provide essential information to the press. Farr testified he obtained copies of the Graham statement from two lawyers and another person subject to the gag order. But he declined to name them. (Indeed, at a June 30, 1971, hearing, one of the Manson case lawyers testified that when he asked Farr who gave him copies of the statement, Farr said, “I wouldn’t even tell my attorney [Grant Cooper] that.” At a July 19, 1971, hearing, Farr asked his attorney to remind Older that “the jury was sequestered,” suggesting that since jurors never saw his story, the gag order violation caused no harm, and told the
Los Angeles Times
[January 30, 1973] he already had the Graham story anyway, and got copies from his three sources merely to “verify” the story he already had.)

Defense attorneys Daye Shinn, Irving Kanarek, and Paul Fitzgerald, and prosecutors Steven Kay, Donald Musich, and I all took the stand. All six denied under oath giving the statement to Farr. At least two of the six were apparently lying. All I know is that I didn’t give Farr the statement. As for who did, the reader’s guess is probably as good as mine.

Judge Older held Farr in civil contempt and sentenced him to an indefinite jail term. He served forty-six days in the Los Angeles County Jail before being freed by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas on January 11, 1973, pending the outcome of a new appeal. Had Farr been cited for criminal contempt and given consecutive sentences, the maximum penalty would have been sixty-five days in jail. But Older cited him for civil contempt, and gave him an indefinite sentence, which could mean that if the higher courts rule against Farr, he could remain in jail for as long as fifteen years, until fifty-five-year-old Charles Older reaches seventy, the mandatory age of retirement!

M
any, though not all, of the hard-core Manson Family members are now serving time in various penal institutions. Other Family members split to follow new leaders. Cathy Gillies, according to information I received, was a “mom” with a motorcycle gang. Maria Alonzo was arrested in March 1974 and charged with plotting to kidnap a foreign consul general to secure the release of two prisoners in the Los Angeles County Jail. As this is written, she has yet to be brought to trial.

For a time there was a spate of books, plays, and motion pictures which, if not glorifying Manson, depicted him in a not wholly unfavorable light. And, for a time, it looked as if a Manson cult was emerging. Not only were there buttons reading “FREE THE MANSON FOUR,” that cancerous growth known as the Family again began growing. When interviewed, the new converts—who had never had any personal contact with Manson—looked and talked exactly like Squeaky, Sandy, and the others, giving rise to the very disturbing possibility that Manson’s madness might be communicable. But the strange phase quickly passed, and there is little left of the Manson Family now, though little Squeaky, chief cheerleader of the Manson cause, is still keeping the faith.

Although undisputed leader of the Family while Charlie is in absentia, and presumably involved in the planning of their activities, and though arrested more than a dozen times on charges ranging from robbery to murder, she has only been convicted a few times, and always on minor charges. Moreover, not long ago she found a champion in, of all places, the District Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.

One of the young deputy DAs, William Melcher, first became acquainted with Squeaky while the group was holding its vigil on the corner of Temple and Broadway. For Christmas 1970, Melcher’s wife baked cookies for the Manson girls, and a friendship developed. Not long after Squeaky was released on the Stockton murder charge, she was rearrested as a suspect in a Granada Hills armed robbery. Convinced they had the wrong person, Melcher successfully proved this to the police and she was freed. Clearing her was, Melcher told the Los Angeles
Times,
“my greatest satisfaction in three years as a prosecutor.” Noting that the group had “a lot of ill-feeling about the police and courts, I wanted them to know that justice also works on their side of the street.” Someday he would like to write a book on the girls, Melcher added. “I’d like to write not an exposé of the tragedy and violence, which I do not condone, but a book about the beauty I’ve seen in that group—their opposition to war, their truthfulness and their generosity.”

T
he fate of Charles Manson, Charles Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, and Robert Beausoleil was decided on February 18, 1972. That day the California State Supreme Court announced that it had voted 6–1 to abolish the death penalty in the state of California. The opinion was based on Article I, Section 6, of the State Constitution, which forbids “cruel or unusual punishment.”
*

The sentences of the 107 persons awaiting execution in California were automatically reduced to life imprisonment.

Manson, in Los Angeles as a defense witness in the Bruce Davis trial, grinned broadly on hearing the news.

In California a person sentenced to life imprisonment is eligible to apply for parole in seven years.

B
y August 1972 the last prisoners had left California’s Death Rows, most to be transferred to the “yards,” or general inmate population, of various state penal institutions. Although at this writing Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten remain in the special security unit constructed for them at the California Institute for Women at Frontera, it is likely that in time they will join the general population also.

In his psychiatric report on Patricia Krenwinkel, Dr. Joel Hochman said that of the three girls Katie had the most tenuous hold on reality. It was his opinion that if she were ever separated from the others and the Manson mystique, it was quite possible she would lose even that, and lapse into complete psychosis.

With regard to Leslie Van Houten, who of the three girls was least committed to Manson, yet still murdered for him, I fear that she may grow harder and tougher; I have very little hope for her eventual rehabilitation.

Writing of Susan Atkins, Los Angeles
Times
reporter Dave Smith expressed something which I had long felt. “Watching her behavior—bold and actressy in court, cute and mincing when making eye-play with someone, a little haunted when no one pays attention—I get the feeling that one day she might start screaming, and simply never stop.”

As for the other convicted Manson Family killers—Charles Watson; Robert Beausoleil; Steve Grogan, aka Clem; and Bruce Davis—all are now in the general inmate population. Tex is no longer playing insane and has a girl friend who visits him regularly. Bobby received a certain amount of national attention when he was interviewed by Truman Capote during a TV documentary on American prisons. Not long afterward his jaw was broken and his hand dislocated in a brawl in the yard of San Quentin. The fight was the result of a power struggle over the leadership of the Aryan Brotherhood, with which Beausoleil had become affiliated. The AB, which is believed responsible for more than a dozen fatal stabbings in various California prisons in the last few years, is the successor to several earlier groups, including a neo-Nazi organization. Its total membership is not known, but it is believed to have about two hundred hard-core inmate followers, and it espouses many of the same racial principles that Charles Manson did. The legacy lives on.

Of all the Manson Family killers, only their leader merits special handling. In October 1972, Charles Manson was transferred to the maximum security adjustment center at Folsom Prison in Northern California. Described as “a prison within a prison,” it provides special housing for “problem inmates” who cannot be safely controlled in the general prison population. With the transfer Manson lost not only all of the special privileges afforded those awaiting execution, he also lost his regular inmate privileges, because of his “hostile and belligerent attitude.”

“Prison is my home, the only home I ever had,” Manson often said. In 1967 he begged the authorities not to release him. Had anyone heeded his warning, this book need never have been written, and perhaps thirty-five to forty people now dead might still be alive.

In convicting him, Manson said, I was only sending him home. Only this time it won’t be the same. Observed San Quentin warden Louis Nelson, before Manson was transferred to Folsom: “It would be dangerous to put a guy like Manson into the main population, because in the eyes of other inmates he didn’t commit first-class crimes. He was convicted of killing a pregnant woman, and that sort of thing doesn’t allow him to rank very high in the prison social structure. It’s like being a child molester. Guys like that are going to do hard time wherever they are.”

Too, like Sirhan Sirhan, convicted slayer of Senator Robert Kennedy, his notoriety is his own worst enemy. For as long as he remains in prison, Manson will be looking over his shoulder, aware that any con hoping to make a reputation need only put a shiv in his back.

That Manson, Watson, Beausoleil, Davis, Grogan, Atkins, Van Houten, and Krenwinkel will be eligible for parole in 1978 does not mean that they will get it, only that this is the earliest date they will be eligible to apply. The average incarceration in California for first degree murder is ten and a half to eleven years. Because of the hideous nature of their crimes and the total absence of mitigating circumstances, my guess is that all will serve longer periods: the girls fifteen to twenty years, the men—with the exception of Manson himself—a like number.

As for the leader of the Family, my guess is that he will remain in prison for at least twenty-five years, and quite possibly the rest of his life.

In mid-October of 1973 some thirty prisoners in California’s toughest lockup, Folsom Prison’s 4–A adjustment center, staged what was described by the San Francisco
Chronicle
as a “peaceful protest” against prison conditions.

The man who used and championed fear did not participate. According to the
Chronicle
story: “Mass murderer Charles Manson is among the inmates in 4–A, although prison spokesmen say he is not involved in this demonstration. Manson has been threatened by other inmates in the past, and authorities say he seldom ventures out of his cell for fear of being attacked.”

Twenty-five years after, as I said in my summation to the jury, Charles Manson “sent out from the fires of hell at Spahn Ranch three heartless, bloodthirsty robots” to commit the savage and nightmarish Tate-LaBianca murders, the nation continues to be fascinated with the Manson murder case. And the question I am always asked, particularly by the news media, is why?

Why has this mass murder case—as opposed to every other, and there have been many—continued to intrigue and captivate millions of people the world over? To the point where five-year anniversaries of the murders, as with no other murder case in America except the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, are marked by articles, news reports, and television specials, not just in the United States, but internationally.
*
To the point where, as reported in the Los Angeles
Times
, Manson receives more mail than any other inmate in the history of the U.S. prison system, an alarming amount of it from young people who tell him they want to join his Family; where Manson T-shirts are selling well today around the country; where there have been several plays about him, even an opera,
The Manson Family
, that premiered at New York City’s Lincoln Center in July of 1990—as well as a CD soundtrack of the opera released in 1992; where the multi-platinum rock band Guns N’ Roses sing a Manson composition, “Look at Your Game, Girl,” in their latest album; where, believe it or not, avant-garde typographers in California produced a new typeface called Manson in which for $95 art directors, per
Time
magazine, “can set their serial-killer Zeitgeist essays in Manson Regular, Manson Alternate or Manson Bold” (all renamed Mason after criticism); where “Free Manson” graffiti soils the landscape of Britain’s largest cities, and according to the BBC’s William Scanlan Murphy, Manson interest in Britain is approaching mini-mania proportions;
*
where the television adaptation of this book about the case was, when it aired in 1976, the most watched television movie in the history of the medium and, like no other film of a murder case ever, has continued to be shown, year after year without fail, in the United States and many other countries of the world; where a March 1994 ABC television special on the case produced the highest-ever ratings for a network magazine show debut. Again, why is this so?

After the Tate-LaBianca murders, there was a killer in Los Angeles called “The Trashbag Killer,” so named because he picked up drifters and hitchhikers, murdered and dismembered them, then put them in trash bags. He pled guilty to twenty-one murders. Yet, I don’t remember this murderer’s name. And I would wager that if you were to ask one hundred people in Los Angeles you’d be hard-pressed to find one person who did. This is not that uncommon. At the time of a mass murder, and when the suspected killer is apprehended and tried, there’s always considerable publicity. As a general rule, however, within a short time thereafter the murders and the identity of the perpetrator tend to fade from the public’s consciousness. But not so with the Manson case. In fact, next to Jack the Ripper, whose identity still hasn’t been conclusively established, Manson is probably the most famous and notorious mass murderer ever. So what is it?

A view that’s enjoyed some currency is that the murders represent a watershed moment in the evolving social structure of our society. This view holds that the Manson case was the “end of innocence” (the ’60s mantra of love, peace, and sharing) in our country, and sounded the death knell for hippies and all they symbolically represented. In Joan Didion’s memoir of the era,
The White Album
, she writes: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969…and in a sense this is true.” Even now, in 1994, ABC’s Diane Sawyer endorses this notion when she says the Manson murders “brought an end to the decade of love,” and “something changed in the heart of America” with the murders.

Others feel, less extravagantly, that the murders were emblematic of the counterculture flower gone to seed. As
Time
magazine said in 1989 on the twentieth anniversary of the murders, the three female killers were “any family’s daughters, caught up in the wave of drugs, sex and revolutionary blather that had swept up a generation of young people.”

Or, some thought for a time after the murders, perhaps Manson and his disciples represented a ten-or twenty-year extrapolation of the direction in which the counterculture movement was going. And so forth.

All of these hypotheses seem to be devoid of supporting empirical evidence. For instance, although the Manson murders may have hastened its descent, the Age of Aquarius, of which Woodstock (one week after the Manson carnage) was at once its finest hour and last gasp, was already in decline. As the decade of dissent and raw excess approached its denouement, the movement’s mecca, Haight-Ashbury, was in ruins, and America had begun its retreat from the war in Vietnam—the political
raison d’être
fueling the movement. Moreover, Manson and the madness he wrought did not reflect the soul of the late ’60s, when admittedly the anti-establishment movement had reached a feverish crescendo. That movement indeed wanted a new social order, but largely one brought about by peaceful means. Manson advocated violence, murder, to change the status quo. As pointed out in the body of this book, though Manson was a hero to some, according to surveys at the time a majority of young people whom the media labeled “hippies” disavowed Manson, stating that what he espoused, i.e., violence, was antithetical to their beliefs.
*

And we certainly know, from the unerring rearview mirror of twenty-five years later, that Manson and these murders did not represent a foreboding extension of the direction in which the anti-establishment movement was going.

The sociological implications and legacy, then, of the murders may be no more than that they constituted a reaffirmation of the verity that whenever people surrender their minds and souls to a dictatorial cult figure, there comes a point for the followers when it is too late to turn back, and (as with the masses following the despots of history) whatever direction he goes in, he takes them with him. With the Reverend Moon, for example, it is a life of sleeping on floors and eating mush while he buys more yachts and mansions. With the Reverend Jim Jones and David Koresh, it was suicide. With Manson, murder.

In searching for a more prosaic explanation for the seemingly timeless resonance of the case, observers have pointed to the fact that Manson and his minions may have murdered as many as thirty-five people, and already had plans to murder celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, Steve McQueen, and Tom Jones. But apart from the planned celebrity killings, murders by other mass murderers numbering in the twenties and one in the thirties (John Wayne Gacy, thirty-three) have been confirmed. Others have spoken of the brutality of the murders. But though few, there have been murders even more brutal. Still others have pointed to the prominence of the victims—but they weren’t
that
prominent.

Although all of these elements have undoubtedly contributed to the durability of the case, I believe the main reason for the continuing fascination with it at such a late date is that the Manson murder case is almost assuredly the most bizarre mass murder case in the recorded annals of crime. And for whatever reason, people are magnetically fascinated by things that are strange and bizarre. If these murders had never happened, and someone wrote a novel with the same set of facts and circumstances, most people would put it down after a few pages; because as I understand it, to be good fiction it has to be somewhat believable, and this story is just too far out.

There is another compelling reason for the continuing fascination with the case. The very name “Manson” has become a metaphor for evil, catapulting him to near mythological proportions. Charles Manson has come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity; and again, there is a side to human nature that is fascinated by pure, unalloyed evil. On a lesser scale, why are there so many popular books and crime shows on television dealing with murder—evil’s ultimate act? (Across the water, one recalls George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Decline of the English Murder,” in which he speaks of the pleasure he and his countrymen receive from reading about a sensational murder in the comfort of their drawing rooms.) Since we place so much value on human life, why do we glorify, in a perverse sort of way, the extinguishment of life? The answer to that question, whatever it is, is at least a partial answer to why people continue to be fascinated by Hitler, Jack the Ripper—Manson.

As with evil, fright also has its allure. The quality of a horror movie, we know, is generally considered to be directly proportionate to the extent to which it terrifies. Manson, of course, delivers on the fright meter like perhaps no one else; his Hitlerian stare fixed upon us from places as diverse as the television screen and the covers of magazines, to the underground albums of his music and his wax frame at Madame Tussaud’s in London. “People worry about this man the way they worry about cancer and earthquakes,” a reporter wrote in 1979. “Just recently”—he quotes a California state prison official—“a New York woman phoned to say she had a dream that Manson made a break and started going after Jews. She wanted to make sure there’s no chance he can escape.” Los Angeles
Times
columnist Howard Rosenberg calls Manson “America’s preeminent bogeyman.” Not only were the murders he ordered the type one doesn’t even see in horror movies, but Manson, like no other mass murderer of this century, has added a shivering new dimension to the fright quotient—his diabolical and singular talent for getting others, without asking any questions, to kill complete strangers for him at his command. Dr. David Abrahamsen, a noted psychiatrist who has studied the history of violence in America, says he has never heard of any parallel for such a phenomenon. With other prominent mass murderers—from Charles Starkweather, David Berkowitz, Henry Lee Lucas, Charles Whitman, and Richard Speck to Ted Bundy; from Juan Corona, Dean Corll, Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez to Jeffrey Dahmer—without exception they committed the murders by themselves or participated with others in the act. The fright generated by these heavyweights of homicide’s rogue gallery, then, was always finite. Because of Manson’s ability to control others and get them to vent his spleen on society for him, the probability of death has always been exponential, and therefore much more frightening.

Some have compared Manson with the Reverend Jim Jones and David Koresh. Although to their followers, Jones, Koresh, and Manson were all messianic, and each possessed the uncommon ability to totally control and dominate the lives of those who believed in them, the comparison ends there. During the final moments of Jones and Koresh, in a state of dementia they ordered the suicide of their followers, then proceeded to take their own lives also. Turning their power over others inward by ordering and participating in mass suicide is a far cry from Manson driving down dark streets with his followers randomly looking for homes into which he could send them to commit human slaughter. Prior to the last days of Jones and Koresh, there is no evidence that either had ordered others to murder anyone for them. With Manson, murder was his religion, his credo, his way of life. As Paul Watkins said, “Death is Charlie’s trip.”

Derivatively, Manson’s slavishly obedient followers had come to share this hellish passion. Telling cellmates Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham about the act of murder and the Family’s plan to start traveling throughout the country, killing people and whole families at random, Susan Atkins had said animatedly, “The more you do it, the better you like it.”

If Manson has continued to fascinate mainstream America, he has also done so with its fanatical elements. Today, almost every disaffected and morally twisted group in America, from Satanists to neo-Nazi skinheads, has embraced Manson and the poisons of his virulent philosophy. He has become their spiritual icon, the high priest of anti-establishment hatred. As columnist William Buckley put it, Manson has become “the nation’s leading anti-citizen.” Wayne McGuire, in
Aquarian Journal
, predicts that “sometime in the future Charles Manson will metamorphose into a major American folk hero.” Though Frenchmen will likely stop drinking wine before that happens,
*
Manson is indeed a hero to many on the jagged margins of our culture. In a 1994 interview, seventeen-year-old +Natalie,
*
a Satanist, says: “Charles Manson is an idol and role model.” The murders happened, she says, because “Manson wanted a new government and anarchy to clear out the garbage, the useless people.” Her twenty-year-old boyfriend, +Robert, a fellow Satanist with whom she lives in San Francisco, adds about the Tate-LaBianca victims: “I feel that might is right, and whoever isn’t prepared to defend their own life shouldn’t cry when their life is taken.” +Willie, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist, says he “got into Manson on the twentieth anniversary of the Tate killings when I went to this heavy metal tribute to him. I had already met all the peace and love cult people and when I ran into the Satan types I liked all the negative aspects they stood for. So ever since, I’ve been hanging out with people that support Manson.” Willie feels that as a white man he is the victim of racism in our society, that blacks are “like Neanderthals and overpopulating our culture.” If Manson got out, “he would improve the quality of life.” +Alex, a forty-two-year-old neo-Nazi who has corresponded with Manson for years, says his “discovery” of Manson can only be compared to his earlier discovery of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party. He calls Manson “the foremost revolutionary leader in the world today,” and is special “by virtue of a one in a hundred million shot of gene combinations that gives him his ideas, personality, and physical presence.”

To the extremists, mass murderers like John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer are no more intriguing than they are to the average citizen. They are merely very sick psychopaths who kill for no reason other than to satisfy their unchecked homicidal urges. Though these killers attract inevitable media attention and interest for a while, they have no followers nor anything to say, and if and when they do talk, not even the extremists listen. The only message these homicidal monsters have to give by their violence is horror. Manson and his murders, on the other hand, are downright hip to the extremists. As misdirected as it was, his violence was political, revolutionary, and therein lies his main appeal to those on the fringes. Also, aware of the flat intellect of most mass killers, the extremists admire and are impressed with Manson’s unquestioned intelligence, the offbeat and sometimes searing nature of his insights, his enigmatic answers and allusions, and a mental deftness that allows him to speak in riddles, always with an underlying message. In short, they are drawn to the mystery of Manson.